Why Treasurers Care: Uber’s Tokenized Treasury Pilot Targets the Weekend Cash Buffer
Uber has completed a treasury pilot that let it hold corporate cash as tokenized deposits and money market fund shares it could redeem over a weekend, the companies said in a Friday press release. The test targets the cash buffers treasurers keep because markets close.
As CoinDesk reported from the release, Uber used HSBC’s tokenized bank deposits to buy Franklin Templeton’s tokenized money market fund shares through Tradeweb, with Fireblocks providing wallet infrastructure and the transactions settling together on Canton Network.
The problem tokenization is attacking
The financial mechanic here is old, even if the rails are new. Cash parked in a commercial bank account earns less than a money market fund, but fund redemptions run on market hours. Companies that have to pay at night or over a weekend keep extra cash on hand for that reason. That idle cash is the liquidity buffer: safe and available, but earning less than it could.
Uber’s vice president of corporate finance, treasury and capital markets, Odette Rodrigues, framed the pilot’s goal in exactly those terms. “This solution gives us greater flexibility to optimize yield on available cash while meeting payment obligations seamlessly, reducing the need to maintain liquidity buffers.”
If weekend redemption works at scale, the working capital math changes: the buffer shrinks toward what operations actually need, and the difference compounds at money market rates. In the test, the companies said, Uber could redeem part of its holdings including over a weekend, with the fund tokens and the payment moving together in delivery-versus-payment settlement, so neither side could complete without the other.
Two kinds of tokenized money on one rail
The novel part is the pairing. The pilot combined HSBC tokens representing commercial bank money with Franklin Templeton tokens representing fund shares, on the same network. Uber’s pilot is an early public case of the two meeting in a Fortune 500 company’s treasury. It follows other tokenized-cash moves, from SoFi’s tokenized deposit launch to Circle’s USDC settlement pilot on Colombia’s Bre-B network.
For money market fund managers, a treasury channel that stays open over weekends would compete for cash that companies now leave in lower-yielding bank accounts.
The release leaves gaps. No dollar amounts were disclosed, the specific Franklin Templeton fund was not named, and the companies gave no timeline for moving from pilot to production. Rodrigues described the pilot as a first step toward a round-the-clock model for managing Uber’s working capital.
